21 March 2012

As someone who is sex-positive and polyamorous, my views on
sexuality and relationships can be at odds with those of the largely monogamous,
sex-negative mainstream. So it was encouraging to read Jennifer Wilson’s critique of anti-porn, anti-casual sex advocates and their self-righteous moralising.
Wilson’s essay is set within the context of Australian pornography laws (which local
anti-porn campaigners deem insufficiently censorial), but her cogent arguments are not
restricted to any one country or culture. Take these for example:

In my opinion some campaigners are engaged
in a moral battle to control who may desire whom, when and how. Their arguments
are founded on conservative moral assumptions about what sex is or ought to be,
how it can and can’t be performed, and by whom. To this end they define
pornography as not about sex, but solely about violence against women.

Anti porn campaigners conflate sexual violence and
exploitation with pornography to strengthen their argument against it, even
though there’s a variety of porn available, from the inoffensive to the
frightening. They allow no exceptions: their position is that all porn is bad
because all porn is inherently violent and exploitative.

20 March 2012

Fans of the Batman film trilogy by director
Christopher Nolan may be relieved to know that Nolan’s upcoming finale ‘The
Dark Knight Rises’ will not be the last Batman film they will ever see. Producer
and director Michael Bay recently announced his plans to produce a new Batman
film, tentatively set for a December 2013 release. Speaking at the Nickelodeon Upfront
in New York, Bay promised Batman fans that his take on the Caped Crusader will live up to
the high standards set by Nolan.

“Chris brought a gritty realism and darkness to the Batman
story, and I intend to preserve that,” Bay said.

But then the ‘Transformers’ director dropped a bombshell: he
would be changing the Dark Knight’s origins.

“In my film, Batman, that’s Bruce Wayne, is going to be an
alien,” he said, “And he’s going to have really cool superpowers that aid him
in his crime-fighting.”

"I'm an alien, I'm a legal alien..."

Bay will also apply his poetic license to Bruce Wayne’s
life-defining moment: witnessing the murder of his parents by a mugger. In Bay’s
reboot, the alien Wayne sees his home planet destroyed by an
intergalactic criminal organisation of giant transforming robots, leaving him its
sole survivor. Bay stated that his version of the Batman mythos “will lend
more credibility to Batman’s psychopathic obsession with fighting crime.”

“It’s not just his parents that get killed, but his entire race. Now that kind of loss would be far more traumatic than just having your parents killed. Lots of people have had their parents killed by criminals. But they don’t go running around in batsuits beating up bad guys, do they?”

And Bay’s reason for giving Batman superpowers?

“Because I fucking can.”

Needless to say, fans are not happy with Bay for changing the
origins and very nature of DC Comics’ most commercially successful character. The
public outcry has prompted Bay to issue this response on his official website:

“Fans need to take a breath, and chill. They have
not read the script. Our team is working closely with one of the original
creators of Batman to help expand and give a more complex back story. Relax, we
are including everything that made you become fans in the first place. We are
just building a richer world.”

Considering that both Batman creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger are deceased, Bay may have recruited John Edward to join the production team.

Bay also mentioned plans to make a live-action Care Bears
movie, based on the plush toys and animated TV series popular during the 1980s.
“It’s still in the conceptual stage, so not a lot is certain just yet,” he
said, “but one thing’s for sure – these Care Bears are going to be aliens.”

15 March 2012

Pick up any random women’s magazine and you are almost
guaranteed to find a prettily illustrated astrology section. Men’s magazines in
contrast rarely have a ‘masculine’-looking equivalent to Cosmopolitan’s sorbet-coloured horoscopes. It’s as if the
belief in astronomy’s nonsensical doppelganger is essentially feminine, like
lipstick and pencil skirts. Do magazine publishers presume that men are too
sensible to buy into the touchy-feely mysticism of star signs?

This common stereotyping of women as being more intuitive,
more emotional, more irrational than men is not only grossly
inaccurate, but also harmful to the cause of gender equality. It sends out the
message that reason and critical thinking are the preserve of the logical male.
Women, meanwhile, can go channel their inner Goddess and connect with the
Sacred Feminine while the men get on with becoming scientists, engineers and
humourless skeptics.

Thankfully we have awesome female skeptics and rationalists
like the ladies at Skepchick. Amy Davis Roth argues that skepticism is a gender-neutral worldview that, unlike faux-feminist mysticism, truly empowers
women by giving them thinking skills that enable them to gain real
knowledge. As Davis Roth writes to a Skepchick reader:

Don’t let superstition and the
stereotypical roles of women influence your ability to understand reality and
to educate yourself. Rise up, continue to speak up and fight back against the
flood of anti-intellectualism and ignorance.

Davis Roth also smacks down the ridiculous idea that skepticism
and the scientific method are ‘privileged’ worldviews that deny the validity of
other ways of understanding reality. You’ll just have to read her post to witness
her argument in all its acerbic glory. It’s a thing of beauty.

12 March 2012

I confess that I’m one of those neuroscience buffs who
overestimate the advances made in this field of study. Rejecting dualism comes
with a hazard: you tend to idealise any technology that can potentially prove
once and for all that the mind is entirely created by the brain. But my
idealism has been tempered with a healthy dose of realism after reading this article - it describes the limits of current neuroscience technology like functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and shows the dangers of
overselling the usefulness of neuroimaging. Conversely, it also touches on
the danger of ignoring the contributions of neuroimaging, particularly
in disciplines like psychiatry. This paragraph makes it quite clear that
psychiatry needs to do some serious house cleaning if it is to remain a
credible science.

Neuroimaging
research also could completely change how we think about psychiatric disorders
by rendering obsolete the idea that using discrete diagnostic categories such
as schizophrenia or attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) provides
the best way to understand the underlying disorders. Today, these diagnoses are
based on formal criteria, outlined in the American Psychiatric Association’sDiagnostic and Statistical
Manual, that specify symptoms for each disorder. But these
criteria have no basis in neuroscience. In fact, the psychiatric community has
become increasingly concerned that traditional diagnostic categories actually
obscure the underlying brain systems and genes that lead to mental health
problems. In addition, a growing body of evidence indicates that many
psychiatric problems lie on a continuum rather than being discrete disorders,
in the same way that hypertension reflects the extreme end of a continuum of
blood pressure measurements. Neuroimaging provides us the means to go beyond diagnostic
categories to better understand how brain activity relates to psychological
dysfunction, whereas using it to “diagnose” classical psychiatric disorders
could obscure, rather than illuminate, the true problems.

I’m still a staunch materialist, and all this new
information doesn’t suggest that dualism is a valid idea. What it does suggest is that although the field of neuroscience is discovering more and more about
how the brain gives rise to consciousness, we shouldn’t attribute discoveries
to it that it hasn’t actually made.